Richard Thomas Moynan

Richard Thomas Moynan was born on 27 April 1856 in Dublin, Ireland. He was initially educated for the medical profession in Dublin, at either the Royal College of Surgeons or Trinity College Dublin depending on the source, and had nearly completed his training before abandoning medicine for art shortly before his final examinations.

He enrolled at the Royal Dublin Society's School of Art around 1879 to 1880, winning the Taylor Prize for painting in 1881 and the Cowper Prize for drawing from life in 1882. He then moved to the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools, where he won medals and a painting-class prize, and in 1883 was awarded the Albert Scholarship for his student picture The Last Stand of the 24th at Isandula. That scholarship funded further study at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp under Charles Verlat, where he took first place in the Academy's painting competition, and he completed his training at the Academie Julian in Paris under masters including Bouguereau, Robert-Fleury, Courtois, and Collin. He returned to Dublin around the end of 1886.

Back in Dublin, Moynan built a career as a portraitist and genre painter, becoming an Associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy on 18 October 1889 and a full member roughly nine months later. He exhibited regularly at the RHA through the 1890s and into 1901, painting portraits of physicians and civic figures alongside genre subjects and the military scene Military Manoeuvres (1891). He died at his home, 15 Garville Avenue, Rathgar, Dublin, on 10 April 1906, and was buried on 12 April at Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.

Moynan's contemporaries recognized him through the institutional ladder of the period: prizes at the Royal Dublin Society's School of Art, medals at the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools, the Albert Scholarship, a competition win in Antwerp, and eventual full membership of the Royal Hibernian Academy by 1890. His obituary in the Irish Times in April 1906 described his decisive break from medicine in favor of art. Modern attention to his work centers on two threads: art-historical interest in Military Manoeuvres as a technically ambitious genre and military subject, documented through the National Gallery of Ireland's research into his surviving sketchbooks, and separate scholarly interest in the political cartoons and unionist-themed illustrations he produced later in his career. No further verbatim critical assessments from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile.

Moynan's auction market is small and centered on the Irish sale rooms. The highest documented public price for his work is EUR 140,000, the hammer price recorded by Adams, Dublin, for the painting The Departure at auction on 4 December 2012; some secondary market sources cite this same sale at EUR 160,000, a discrepancy that has not been independently resolved. Other recorded results include EUR 16,000 at Whyte's in Dublin on 22 February 2005 for Cattle Grazing (After the Milking), and GBP 7,728 for Dublin Street Boy at Great Western Auctions' Winter Fine Art and Antiques sale in late 2024. Given the limited number of public sales, collectors should treat any single result as a data point rather than a trend line, and should confirm they are researching this artist and not an unrelated, later American artist sometimes catalogued simply as Richard Thomas.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Moynan and no artist estate or foundation; verification of a given work rests on Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition records, auction house provenance research, and comparison to catalogued museum holdings such as the National Gallery of Ireland's Military Manoeuvres. The public auction record is thin, with a documented high of EUR 140,000 for The Departure (Adams, Dublin, 2012; some sources cite EUR 160,000), so pricing for any individual work should be researched case by case rather than assumed from a market average. Because the name Richard Thomas also attaches to an unrelated twentieth-century American artist in some market databases, collectors and researchers should confirm they are looking at listings for Richard Thomas Moynan, RHA, 1856 to 1906, specifically.